Error 500 messages

I’m using WordPress 2.7 and for several weeks now my site is giving me Error 500 messages. If I go into SSH and type ‘ps faux’ I discoger there are loads of index.php processes running. Here’s a sample:

Thanks for the comment. I have previously disabled and re-enabled various plugins and this hasn’t revealed the problem. I’m going to try changing themes later, but as that will stop some of the site from being available I need to do some preparation before I can flick that switch.

In the meantime from looking at these threads I wondered if the problem might be related to Permalinks:

I switched to the default setting and tried to see if I could provoke the 500 Errors again – I edited lots of posts at once, changed category and tag assignments en masse, all the sorts of things that usually causes the errors, and nothing happened. I spent perhaps an hour trying to provoke an Error 500.

So I switched back to the ‘Day and Name’ permalinks and tried to cause the errors again, and still nothing.

So I don’t know whether:

(a) The Permalinks weren’t the cause of the errors in the first place.
(b) The Permalinks were the cause of the errors, and briefly switching between Default and ‘Day and Name’ permalinks somehow cleared the fault.
(c) The Permalinks were the cause of the errors, and the problem isn’t fixed, it just hasn’t happened yet today.

I guess I’ll know next time I’m trying to get something on the site in a hurry and I get a 500 Error and fling my computer across the room. Until I can get through a week without having to go into SSH and clear dead processes to rectify a 500, I’ll consider this problem unresolved.

Sure enough. for the past 20 minutes the site has been running very slowly. I had a look in SSH and multiple instances of index.php processes were stacking up (as described in my first post). It took several attempts (using kill -9 -1) to get them to all clear, and now the site is running OK again.

So we can rule out option (b) from the above. I’m going to switch back to default permalinks now and see whether any more errors happen.